update: phpDocumentor development

Hello all, It's been a slower week than last due to exams on Josh's part and some major concerts on my part, but we managed to get the groundwork laid for a complex tutorial/manual system. The requests we've had for linking to external documentation, and to link to a specific part of external documentation has been answered. In our quest to make phpDocumentor multiple output format-capable, we have implemented a system of parsing external documentation in docbook format as I described in an earlier post. external documentation is associated with API documentation via package and subpackage. There are three kinds of external documentation supported: package- and subpackage-level, class-level, and procedural-level. Class and Procedural-evel documentation will be attached to API elements via the filename of the documentation. If it a tutorial/manual file is in directory packagename/subpackagename/classname.cls and there is a class in package packagename, subpackage subpackagename named "classname," the tutorial and the class will be linked so that the Converter can do whatever final output is needed to link them together. Very soon, we will have an online example of this kind of documentation. To remain flexible, documentation may be spread across several different files. phpDocumentor makes this convenient by providing both links in the left-hand side of the screen (for HTML converters) and next/prev/up links (for HTML Converters) similar to the php manual. The PDF Converter will use this information to generate a hierarchical table of contents. The use of an external .ini file to specify tutorial file order and hierarchy maintains easy order switching without modifying any package-level documentation. These choices also make it very easy to write high-quality documentation for peardoc2 without worrying about order - the order of files can be switched without having to touch the entities that determine this order (they are automatically generated by the peardoc2 template of the DocBook converter). The output format of tutorial/manual files has been greatly improved by the addition of a template file in which the output is fit into. In this way, special formatting instructions can be specified to allow prettier output for those who need it. By default, the tutorial/manual files will use the same stylesheet as the API docs to keep a consistent look across the project documentation. This is a major upgrade in appearance over 1.1.0's package-level documentation. This style of external documentation will also easily allow the creation of special extended converters that only output tutorial/manual documentation, as requested by one user (this has not yet been added, but will be). sample output from the new phpedit template is available at http://www.joshuaeichorn.com/~CelloG/out and is updated nearly every day based on the current cvs build. Thanks for all of your input, it's been very helpful. Take care, Greg